The Making - Episode 1

How do you make work that doesn't just sell, but stays?
That was the question. This is where we start finding the answer.
In this episode, I sat with a book written by two people who have spent decades inside the African marketing industry, not studying it from the outside, but building it. Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson and Joel Nettey put 150 rules on paper, so the next generation doesn't have to figure it all out from scratch.
And here is what those rules are really saying.
African marketing doesn't need to borrow frameworks from markets that look nothing like ours. The landscape, the culture, the trust dynamics are different here. And the executives who understand that are the ones making work that lasts.
This is Episode 1 of The Making - a series where I go through Rules for the Marketing Communications Executive, rule by rule, and show you what they look like in the real world.
This is the beginning of a new dawn.

📖Get the book: Rules for the Marketing Communications Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson & Joel Nettey
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Chapters
0:00 inttro
1:03 Why Ghana Finally Has Its Own Marketing Bible
2:41 The Story Behind the Book
5:36 Rule 1: Read the Room Before You Brief It
10:18 Rule 2: You Are an Architect, Not a Decorator
18:17 Rule 3: Communication Doesn't Just Report Value — It Creates It
25:22 Rule 9: Your Work Shapes Culture. Are You Doing It Deliberately?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Marketing magic. Action oriented strategies that would help you find customers, promote your products, blah blah blah. The new marketing paradigm, integrated marketing communications. Marketing 4.0, moving from traditional to digital, Philip Kotler, the grandfather. Integrated marketing communications, putting it together and making it work. I got you on advertising. I'm sure anyone who's in advertising has probably read this book. Now, this is not the original. This is a remake by Miles Young, but there's the original. And the marketing Bible. Marketing Management by Kotlin Keller. We all know about this, right? These books have shaped how marketers think. Not just in Europe or America, but right here in Ghana, across Africa. Ogilvie, Hegeti, Kotla, you name them. These are the names we grew up studying, the frameworks we borrowed, the perspectives we built our careers on. And for a long time, something has been missing. We had books written, all of these books written about markets that look nothing at like ours, written by people who have never sat in a boardroom in Africa, Accra, Lagos, and Nairobi. And we adapted it. We made it work. But we were always translating, taking principles from one context and trying to make them fit into another. But now we have this. Rules of the Marketing Communications Executive: what Marketing Communications Execs do, and how to do it with excellence by Joel E. Nete and Prof. Professor Robert Ebohinson. Two of my favorite people. And um, well, I I I got I got this book two days to the launch. Very privileged. And as you can see, well, Joel gave me an autograph. I believe could go out and win, be blessed, Joel. There are other things, but I'm not going to read them. Anyway, uh, Prof. Joel, they they they've put together this very amazing book. 150 rules written from right inside the African marketing communications industry, not imported, not translated, but ours. And honestly, I'd love to see Prof and um Joel follow this up with something in the spirit of Conferences of an Advertising Man or Gilvion Advertising. A book that would tell us uh the stories of their era. I mean, they're still here, but what made Originate Saatchi and Saatchi what it was? The decisions, the campaigns, the moments that most people in the industry don't even know about. Stories that actually shaped advertising in this country. Twenty years ago, the Ghanaian advertising industry lost Daniel Chum. He was a CEO of Originate Sachi and Saatchi at the time when the advertising industry in Ghana was being built. So Prof. Njou marked his 20th anniversary of his passing by launching the fellowship in his name and this book. It was emotional. I was at the event, it was emotional, it was reflective, and you could feel in the room that this wasn't just a book released. It was an act of preservation. Um, two men who have spent their entire lives in the industry put everything they've learned on paper so the next generation doesn't have to figure it out all from scratch. And that's why this book is important. That's why this book matters. One of the authors is a professor, a scholar at the highest order in the markets and discipline. The other is one of the most respected practitioners in the industry here in Ghana and across the world globally. And what they've produced together in this book is not theory, it is a it's not a textbook. It's field work. Every rule in here comes from real rooms, real campaigns, real conversations, and real consequences. This book is earned, really. And if you've been following Mad Conversations, you know we just completed season one and season two is coming. But we are creating space between these two deliberately to sit with the quality found in this book because some materials are too important to rush past on the way to the next thing. And that's what this series is. It's called the making, right here on Mart Conversations. This is where I sit with the book, pick the rules that hit the hardest, and tell you what they look like in the real world. If you don't own this book, please do get it. Um I'll tell you where you can get it at the end of the episode. But for now, let me take you into part one. Now, before we get into the main thing, I need to read a very important note in the book that the authors put there. I believe they put it there for a reason. So I'm going to read it to us before we get into it. A word on what this book is not. It is not a checklist that guarantees success if followed mechanically. Marketing communication is too complex, too human, and too contextual for that. The rules are not prescriptions, they are frameworks for thinking. And I think that it's very important that we understand this context, right? So, what we are going to do is we are going to think through the book together. Everything that I say is my they are my thoughts essentially about what the book is trying to tell us. And I have picked so many lessons from the book that I'm going to apply along my journey. So let's get into it. Well, part one of the book is campaign mindset. It has 10 rules, and I'm going to talk to you about four of them in this episode. Rules one, two, three, and nine. And I chose these four because together they build an argument. Rule one talks to you about your landscape, knowing your landscape rules. Rule two tells you to know your role within that landscape. Rule three tells you where the value actually comes from. And rule nine tells you what your work does to people beyond the brief. That's the arc. Landscape, role, value, responsibility. Let's get into it. Rule one under the campaign mindset. Understand the modern campaign environment before you enter it. The executive who walks into a campaign without first understanding the environment you will live in is like a navigator who sets sail without consulting weather, current, or chart. The destination may be clear, the journey will not be. The modern campaign environment is defined above all by density. Consumers in contemporary markets, urban consumers especially, are exposed to thousands of promotional messages every day across digital platforms, physical environments, outdoor media, social networks, and interpersonal channels. In cities like Accra, Lagos, Nairobi, and Johannesburg, outdoor advertising competes for attention with the noise of commerce, commutes, and conversation. In digital environments, the scroll is endless and the competition for attention is global and instantaneous. Under these conditions, exposure alone guarantees nothing. A message can be placed in front of a million people and changed and change the behavior of almost none of them if it have if it has not been designed with a sophisticated understanding of the environment it enters. Read the room before you brief it. What is competing for attention? What has already saturated the space? What are the cultural and social conditions that would shape how the message is received? What regulatory or community dynamics will govern what is possible? These are strategic questions that precede every creative question. And the executive who cannot answer them is not yet ready to lead the campaign. Wow. You know, on one of our episodes at Mad Conversations, Andreaka told me something very profound, something very important. He he told me that he counted about 250 billboards on his way to work. 250. Think about it. Just on one commute. And if you are watching this from Accra or Lagos or Nairobi or anywhere on this continent of Africa, you know exactly what this feels like. You are swimming in messages every single day, but out of these 250 billboards, how many do you actually remember? Be honest. Maybe one, maybe two, and the rest? You drove past them. They were there, someone paid for them, but it did nothing to you. That's exactly what the book is talking about. Exposure alone guarantees nothing. A message can sit in front of a million eyeballs and not move a single person because it wasn't designed with any understanding of the world it was entering in. Now think about that one that stopped you. Think about how they made you feel. The feeling is not an accident. That's the work of someone who understood the environment before they entered it. A billboard comes to mind too, actually. In recent times, we saw all over Accra some very interesting billboards about Chadw, the Chad billboard campaign is what we call it. And if you were in Accra, when those billboards came up, I'm sure you'd remember them. Everyone was talking about them. And it was worth asking why. One execution said we don't need hills to be great. If you're not in Ghana, that's probably just the sentence, right? But if you live here, you know exactly what that ad is doing. Every new residential development in this country is calling itself something hills. I don't want to mention names. It doesn't matter if the land is flat or not. Slap hills on it and immediately it sounds premium. The billboard looked at that trend, understood it, and used it to position Chadu as something that doesn't need a label to carry the value. And that's not just clever copywriting, that's environmental reading. Then there is the other execution. It's not Chadu, it's not Cheadu, it's not Chadu, it's Cheadu. Everyone in Accra has mispronounced this name at least once. And um that billboard doesn't lecture you, it laughs with you. It takes a shared cultural experience and turns it into a brand moment. You see it, you smile because you've been that person. You've mispronounced it before. And now you never forget the name or the brand behind it. Let's look at the second example. There's this Phillips Lighting example that we've seen. We saw some years ago. There was one of their ads that said lasts longer than the Black Stars coach. Lasts longer than Bollywood movies, lasts longer than most men. Every single one grabs your attention immediately. Not because of the product, but because the messaging understood what makes Ghanaian audience react. The Black Stars Coach line works because everyone knows how quickly these coaches come and go. The Bollywood line works because Ghanaians have a relationship with these films. I mean, kumkumagia. The most men line, that one speaks for itself. This is what separates a billboard, you remember, from the 249 you don't. The ones that work didn't just ask where do we place this. They asked who is driving past, what are they thinking about, what will make them look twice, and what cultural nerve can we strike? To quote Prof Henson and Joel in the book, this is not intuition. It is the product of systematic observation, research, and intellectual curiosity about the world in which the work will live. And that is rule one. Understand the environment before you enter it, or the environment will ignore you. So let's get into rule two. Know your strategic rule. You are not a decorator, you are an architect. I love this. The most persistent misunderstanding about the marketing communications executive's role is that it is about primarily producing things that look good, sound good, or feel good. This misunderstanding is understandable. The visible outputs of the profession are often beautiful, attention-grabbing, and culturally resonant, and the people who produce them are often creative and expressive. But it is a misunderstanding that, if internalized, produces professionals who are useful for execution and dangerous for strategy. This architectural rule has several specific dimensions that are invisible in the finished campaign but are determinative of whether the campaign works. If you want to know what the architectural rule is talking about, you need to get that book because it's the second paragraph. I'm reading the third paragraph. The first is the problem definition. Organizations often come to their communications professionals with symptoms: declining sales, falling awareness, weakness preferences. Without a clear understanding of the underlying cause, the executive's first strategic responsibility is to diagnose accurately. A campaign designed to solve the problem, to solve the wrong problem, is worse than no campaign at all. Because it consumes resources, generates expectations, and produces no improvements while obscuring the actual issue. The executive who accepts a poorly defined problem and builds a beautiful campaign around it has failed in the most fundamental dimension of their professional role. Know what you are there to do. You are not there to produce attractive outputs. You are there to design systems of influence that achieve defined objectives within real organizational and market conditions. This is the architect's work. Do it with rigor, do it with the rigor and accountability. It deserves. Wow. Now, let's be honest about something. Right? There is this perception of people who do what you and I do. The uncomfortable part is it doesn't just come from outside. A lot of it comes from us as well. Think about Emily in Emily in Paris. That's the version of marketing the world has been sold. Glamorous, fun, creative, cool outfits, good parties, and the occasional clever idea over brunch. It makes for great television, of course, but it also reinforces something very dangerous. The idea that what we do is fundamentally soft work. Nothing serious, nothing rigorous, not nothing strategic really, but just vibes and estates. And you see it in how creatives and marketers carry themselves too. You know the image, the raster wearing, t-shirt rocking, cigarettes smoking, whiskey drinking, creative. As opposed to the finance director in their shaftsuits, clean shoes, looking all prim and proper. One is treated as a serious person, the other is treated as someone who just makes things look nice. And here's the problem. Too many marketers have accepted that framing. They've leaned into the cool creative identity so hard that they've stopped demanding to be seen as strategic. They've decorated themselves into a corner. It's not a problem, really, but it's a problem and it's not new. When I say it's not a problem, I'm trying to say it's not a new problem, right? I read in David Ogilvi's confessions of an advertising man where he said that he was against the use of the word creative for advertising professionals. He preferred them to be known as manufacturers, manufacturers of ideas. And I agree with him because the moment you call yourself a creative, you've already told the room what you think your value is. You've told them you are the ideas person, the aesthetics person, the vibes person. You haven't told them you are the person who solves their business problems. The label itself invites the misunderstanding that uh prof and Joel are talking about. They are diagnosing in the book. And when you are seen as just a decorator, you start acting like one. You wait for the brief instead of shaping it. You measure your value by how good the output looks instead of what it achieved. You stop asking, what problem are we solving and start asking, what will the client look like. That's not how organizations misread us. That's how we misread ourselves. If you are primarily known for producing things that just look good, sound good, or feel good, and not for the strategic thinking behind them. You have misunderstood your own role. Now, let's go back to the gold key campaign. Those billboards didn't happen because someone said make something creative or let's make something creative. We what actually happened, and this came out in a postmotem about the campaign, um, is that the team started with a clearly defined problem, which is real estate's advertising in Ghana is boring. It's the same formula every time. A nice rent of a building, an aspirational code. Everyone does it, and truly it blends all together. Their mandate really was to break through that clutter, uh, not to produce an attractive output. They could have done that easily, I believe. Mine and her team, any design creative, in fact, Social Ghana, the agency that was on it, could have done so much better, right? But they they chose to go a different route because they understood that that was a decorator's work. What they did instead was an architect's work. They looked at the market conditions, they understood the cultural conversations already happening, the hail strand, the mispronunciation problem, and they designed a system of influence that created value beyond the apartment building they were being they were trying to sell. They made Chadumin something in people's minds before anyone ever visited any of their apartments. That's the difference the book is talking about. That's the attention they're drawing at they are drawing our minds to. You are not there to produce attractive outcomes. You are there to design systems of influence that achieve defined objectives within real organizational and market conditions. That is the architect's work. And the first person who needs to believe that is not your CEO or your finance director, it's you. Now let's go to rule number three. Rule three, value is created through communication, not just products. There's a persistent assumption held most strongly by engineers, operations managers, and finance directors that the value of what an organization offers resides exclusively in the product or service itself, in its functionality, quality, and price related to alternatives. Communication, on this view, is the mechanism by which information about what value is transmitted to the market. The product creates value, communication reports it. Consider two products with identical functional specifications offered at identical prices. If one is carried by a brand that the consumer trusts, identifies with, and recognizes across multiple touch points, and the other is not, they will not perform identically in the market. The difference between them is not in the product, it is in what the communication has built around the product: meaning, trust, recognition, and preference. This is not decoration, it's value as real and as commercially consequential as any functional attributes. Communication also creates value through trust. When the promise made by a campaign aligns consistently with the experience delivered by the product or service, trust accumulates. Trust reduces perceived risk, increases willingness to pay, lengthens customer relationships, and generates the referral behavior that no paid media campaign can replicate. Trust is built through communication over time, not through a single campaign, but through the accumulative consistency of everything the organization says and does in public. Communication is not a reporting mechanism of value, it is one of its primary production mechanisms. Act accordingly. You know, when I read this book, when I read this rule, what I thought to myself was that if there is one rule in this book that I wish every CEO, CFO, or CEO on this continent will sit with, it's this one. This book just told you that the value is not determined solely by the products. It is shaped by what communication means. And if you operate in Africa, you need to understand something fundamental about this market. The single biggest adoption problem or buyer on this continent is trust, not price, not access, not awareness, trust. Think about it. Why does someone choose one mobile money platform over the other? When essentially they do the same thing? Why does a home buyer trust one developer and not the other? It is not the product, it's what the communication has built around the product, the perception communication has shaped around the products and the services. And it is where I need to talk directly to C suite executives. I need for the C suite executives to understand, uh, especially those who dismiss top of mind awareness, what we call Toma. For those who may not be familiar, Toma simply means being the first brand that comes to mind. Mind when someone has a need. So if someone has a need about insurance, which company do you think of? That's Toma. You need a bank. What comes to mind? That's Toma. And there are senior leaders in organizations across the continent who think Toma is a vanity metric. Something the marketing department just talks about to justify the budget. And if that's you, I'd encourage you to reassess because Toma is not vanity at all. Toma is the commercial outcome of consistent communication over time. It is trust that's made it's been made visible. It has built a relationship in someone's mind way before they've ever been spoken by your sales team. That's not soft. That's the hardest thing in business. And it's the hardest thing to build, actually. And I hold a strong opinion on this. I believe that the spine of most organizations, whether they acknowledge it or not, is marketing communications. Not because marketers are important or more important than engineers or finance people or operations people, but because marketing communications is the function that shapes perception. And perception is what increases or decreases the value of everything, your product, your brand, your stock price, your ability to attract talent, your negotiating power, everything. If someone thinks lowly of you, you, you will never get what you desire or what you are truly worth. That's true for people and it's true for organizations. The book says it plainly. Communication is not the reporting mechanism of value, it is one of the primary production mechanisms of value. Communication produces value. The executive who treats communication as a cost center rather than a value creator has fundamentally misunderstood where value truly comes from in modern markets. So let's go back to the gold key example one more time. Before that campaign, Chado was just a neighborhood, a location on the map. After the campaign, Chado has become a position, a statement, a brand in itself. The apartments didn't change, the square footage didn't change. But what changed was what Chado meant in people's minds, and that is the value. The meaning, the perception, the elevated value of the entire development massively. That is value created through communication, not through product. That's what rule three is talking about. And if you're a leader who controls budgets and you've been treating your marketing communications function as department that makes things look nice, read this rule three again. Anyway, to the last rule, rule number nine. Your work shapes culture. Carry that responsibility consciously. I love this. Marketing communications isn't a neutral activity. Every campaign that reaches an audience at scale, every image that shapes what beauty looks like, every narrative that defines what success means, every representation that tells a group of people, whether they exist in the imagination of the market, is an act of cultural production. It shapes what is normal, what is desirable, what is visible, and what is invisible. This is not an exaggeration of the profession's importance. It is an accurate description of what campaigns do when they work. In African markets, especially, the cultural stakes of this discipline are acute. Campaigns produced for Ghanaian, Nigerian, Kenyan, or South African consumers that import the visual vocabularies and narrative frameworks of other cultural contexts without adaptation are not just strategically suboptimal. They are a form of cultural carelessness that consumers notice and that over time erodes the brand's credibility with precisely the audience it most needs to reach. Your work shapes culture, do it consciously. The influence you carry is too significant for the alternative. Wow. Let me read that again. Your work shapes culture. Do it consciously. The influence you carry is too significant for the alternative. Do you remember this adjacent?

SPEAKER_00 26:39

You have a yam. Oh sorry, could tell you a bag. If my daughter has a smartphone, hoi, huram. One more fan new phone, sacra. Drop a bait, and I'm shocked. Your Bayra will not show my daughter's wedding pictures on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

And then 21 gigabyte internet. Double the internet for six months. And one month unlimited music from Tico. Drop that yam.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

Smartphone from Tico. Drop that yam.

SPEAKER_02 27:28

You know, before that ad, I don't even remember what we used to call those phones. I'm sure there was a name for it, but I couldn't remember to even tell you. And since that ad, you'd bear witness that it has been the yam phone and nothing has changed it more than 10 years later. These days, people try to be bougie and say feature phone, right? They call it the feature phone, but you and I both know it's a yam phone. In Cel Communications produced that campaign and they didn't just sell a phone. That word didn't exist before the ad ran. Well, yam existed, but not in that context. An advertising campaign created a piece of language that an entire nation adopted and never let go. That is what the book means when it says your work shapes culture. Think about dear dear Ernouani Club. That campaign is well over 30 years. 30 years. And people still say it, they still sing it. It's not really a tagline anymore, it's a phrase. It's lived in conversations that have nothing to do with beer. It's become part of how Ghanaians express a certain attitude, a certain confidence. The campaign ended decades ago. The culture it shaped is still here. And then I think about Misako, Misaka. NTN's ad. Before that campaign, I remember so many telcos had tried to get people onto mobile money. They had run educational campaigns, explainer contents, all the sensible and rational approaches that we could think about. And none of them were breaking through. People understood what mobile money was. They just didn't really trust it enough to use it. Then the Min Saka ad came. Remember the trust thing we're talking about? Everything changed. Think about why it worked. Your grandmother in the village related to it. You in the city could relate to it. It wasn't explaining technology, it was capturing the moments that all of us understood. The joy of knowing that money has arrived. That one word, Minsaaka, made mobile money feel familiar, feel safe, feel like something that was already part of your life. And after that ad, mobile money adoption in Ghana exploded. Not because the product changed, but because the communication around the products made it culturally accessible. That's not a campaign, that's a cultural production. That is an art reshaping how an entire country relates to a financial service. And that's what the book was talking about campaigns that reach audience at scale. You know, these are culture shaping moments. And I need us to be honest about something. We are not making enough of these anymore. Look at what brands are producing these days. Not to shape any culture also, but just to trend. Get people talking for two days, maybe three if you're lucky, uh, a week. Create something that writes whatever wave is hot on social media right now. Um, get your impressions, screenshots, the numbers, put it on the report, and you move on to the next thing. That's what passes for successful marketing communications in a lot of rooms these days. And I understand the pressure. I get it. Clients want results, they can see quickly, agencies need to keep clients happy, the entire ecosystem is pushing everyone towards short-term disposable work. And in the age of digital, it feels like that's all you can do because the feed moves fast, the attention is cheap. But that's exactly the trap the book is warning you about. When you only make work that trend, you are choosing to leave the cultural space empty. And worse, you are leaving it for someone else to feel it. Maybe someone who doesn't understand your markets, maybe someone important, creative from another continent that really doesn't reflect uh your audience at all. The book calls it cultural carelessness, and it's happening every day. The people who may drop that yam, uh, B at the Anuani Club, Minsa Ka campaign, they didn't set out to trend, they set out to mean something. They understood the culture they were speaking to, they found a truth inside it, and they made work that embedded itself in how people talk, think, and behave. That's the standard. Not impression, not virality, but permanence. I mean, impressions are great, virality is great, but we need permanence. Your work shapes culture. The question is whether you're doing it deliberately or you've stopped trying. I mean, as the book says, your work shapes culture. So do it consciously. The influence you carry is too significant for the alternative, it's too significant for the virality. What is part one of this book really telling us? Let's bring it all together. It says the environment is a strategic variable, you have a strategic role to play in it, and your strategic role is to create value intention, and the value you create at scale shapes culture. So if you're not thinking about ultimately shaping culture, you are not doing too much in the value creation process, you are just getting by. I don't need to say you're just making it, you are just getting to that. And we've already established noises that is that one thing that the environment doesn't need so much of right now. That is part one of this book. Four rules out of ten. There are ten rules in part one. We only did four. We need to get there's a six, there are six millennium that will challenge how you think about campaign strategy and your role in the industry. We haven't even touched parts two through eleven yet. If you want to go deeper, get this book. In fact, get it before the next episode comes out. I'll drop the details in the description. If you look on your screen, there is a there's a graphic there, there's a number there. You pick up the phone, you call the number, you get what, and you you would you you can even get two, three, four frames. There's something in here that we just discussed challenged how you think or confirmed something you've been feeling. Share it in the comments, send it to someone on the team to watch it, tell them about it. Send it to your CFO, your CEO, drop it to the group chat. See it. You're not doing software, but it has to start from you. What you are learning from this book, like the book said you need to, it has to guide your thinking. Uh, it's not a framework for you, vestib, but it has to guide your thinking. So I want to hear from you. Subscribe to this channel uh so you don't miss the next episode that I'll drop now. It's a whole series I'm going to drop about 10 of them. Then I promise you, it only gets from here. This has been the making right here on Mark Conversations. I've been your mad friend. I'll be cool. See you in the next one.